Gender, Design and Marketing

How Gender Drives our Perception of Design and Marketing

Gloria Moss

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351934510
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Media & Communications Industry

Product and service designers place increasing emphasis on the colour, form and appearance of what their organization offers and the language with which they describe it. Gloria Moss' erudite, sophisticated and fascinating book, guides the reader to an understanding of the way gender influences our visual perception. In this wide-ranging book the author explores design, visual aesthetics, language and communication, by drawing on an exhaustive range of primary sources of research from psychology, design, branding and communication. The lessons that emerge offer challenges to organizations both in the way in which their design and marketing is perceived by men and women, and how the make-up of their workforce may limit their ability to appreciate and address the diversity of customers' preferences. The challenge for management is to overcome these limitations and ensure that an organization's products and services mirror preferences of customers rather than those of senior managers.

PART I
Setting the Scene

Chapter 1
Customer Demographics: Identifying the Target Market

Knowing Your Market

It was a summer’s day, and the advertising agency was ready to unveil the concept pieces that would be at the core of its marketing campaign. This was a niche agency set up by advertising creatives with experience at some of the UK’s top agencies. Informality was the order of the day and the young creatives sported open-necked shirts and trainers. Sitting on the other side of the room was the client, a natural energy producer who was backing wind turbines. This visionary had devoted his life to harnessing energy from renewable sources and everyone waited expectantly for the white sheets to be removed from the boards around the room.

Commanding the show was the advertising MD, a casually-dressed man in his early 40s, with sleeves rolled up. He stepped back while his assistant, a slightly younger man, took centre stage. ‘We have sourced images which will impact strongly on the energy consumer,’ he explained ‘and our aim is to effect a significant consumer shift from regular energy suppliers to greener sources.’

The sheet from the first board was removed. It showed an image of the founder of the company gazing out at the grey wind turbines that stood immediately outside the window of his empty sitting room. The MD then moved to the second concept board. The sheet was ripped away to reveal a wave of energy decorated with numbers illustrating the Fibonacci sequence, the elegant mathematical formula that lies behind many of the structures of the natural world.

The MD then moved to the final image and a flourish of the hand unleashed a gasp from everyone in the room. All eyes were on a foetus with a gas mask, which was floating in the dark stratosphere encased in a bubble. This was the chilling future awaiting consumers if they did not buy into green energy.

‘Any questions?’ asked the MD as he looked around the room. My hand shot up. ‘Yes, who are these ads aimed at?’ Glances were busily exchanged as it became clear that this question was not anticipated in the briefing notes. As the seconds ticked by and the silence became burdensome, I asked myself how advertising messages could be created without a clear idea of the target market. Yet here was an advertising MD with an excellent track record feeling perfectly fine about presenting ideas which needed no external reference point. Is this acceptable practice or not? Is the creative an artist or a craftsman who adjusts his work to suit the desires of the customer?

The Importance of the Customer

If you asked that question of Michael Hammer, the brains behind the concept of Business Process Reengineering (BPR), he would be unequivocal in his answer. BPR taught businesses worldwide about the need to reconfigure their activities so that the customer was always centre stage, warning companies that business survival depends on shaping products and services around the ‘unique and particular needs’ of their customer (Hammer 1995). One of the results of BPR was to increase the salience of the customer in the eyes of business so Hammer might well have attempted to change the thinking of the solipsistic creative to become more customer centric.

This focus on the customer means that successful businesses are those that keep their customers in view and deliver products matched to their needs. The first step in this process is to identify who exactly is making the purchase decisions about a product, defining them as closely as possible. Traditionally, market research has defined the customer in terms of their social class, age and geographical location, but played scant attention to their gender. Now, after many years out in the cold, a fourth variable, gender, is receiving increasing attention. Some organizations are now taking an important step forward and asking whether their customers are men or women although (as we shall see later) much market research is still rooted in variables such as age, class and location.

Arguably to ignore a person’s gender is to omit vital additional information and this explains why the first substantive plenary session of the 1999 Alpach European Forum on economic and social trends – a symposium attended by business leaders and politicians – was dedicated to the issue of ‘gender differences’. According to many commentators, it is the needs and desires of women that increasingly drive the political and business worlds, and there is a move to try and understand these.

Examples? A crop of books has appeared examining how to sell to women. These include Don’t Think Pink by Lisa Johnson and Andrea Learned, GenderSell by Judith Tingley and Lee Robert, Marty Barletta’s Marketing to Women, Fara Warner’s The Power of the Purse, Bernice Kanner’s Pocketbook Power and Eve-olution: The Eight Truths of Marketing to Women, by Faith Popcorn and Lys Marigold. These authors, all American incidentally, consider that women constitute a sufficiently distinct market to make it worth giving considerable thought as to how best to target products and services at them.

Historically, there has been a range of views on whether women constitute a sufficiently homogeneous group to warrant being the focus of attention with many commentators taking the ‘postmodern’ view that the study of gender can be problematic (Bristor and Fischer 1993). There are several underlying factors, one of which is the lack of a clear understanding of the meaning of gender within the field of marketing with ‘researchers working from very different theoretical perspectives … disagree(ing) on the meanings of the term’ (Caterall and Maclaran 2002, 406). Interpretations can cover a vast range of understandings and we need to be prepared for different perspectives. At one extreme, we find the postmodern view that gender is an unproductive dichotomy rooted in cultural understandings of what it means to be masculine or feminine (Firat 1994), a tradition reflected in the work of post-structuralists such as Judith Butler, and which leads adherents to argue that gender has no place in consumer research and should be abandoned.

A word about Judith Butler. This Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, scored a publishing coup when her PhD thesis, Gender Trouble, was published as a book in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally. The crux of her argument is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender and sexuality is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ‘core’ gender. This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as akin to a performance. This leads her to consider that ‘woman’ as a unitary category is a construct of psychoanalysis, ‘giv(ing) a false sense of legitimacy and universality to a culturally specific and, in some cases, culturally oppressive version of gender identity’ (Butler 1991, 330).

A middle position is adopted by so-called ‘liberal feminists’ who, according to Bristor and Fischer in their excellent review of feminist thinking on consumer behaviour (1993), argue that any inferred psychological male/female differences are not necessarily innate but can develop out of women’s socially allocated roles. According to this way of thinking, sex differences are the simple manifestation of social inequalities and not the result of biological differences. Liberal feminists are not sympathetic to the notion that there is a biological basis to cognitive abilities but accept a causal link between social inequalities and sex differences. As a result, they believe that single-sex samples may lack validity for generalized consumer behaviour knowledge for as long as the social inequalities prevail. As inequalities are removed (so the thinking goes), observed psychological differences will diminish or disappear, and this will result in widespread androgyny (Jagger 1983). The reader may be interested to know that, in the early 1990s when Bristor and Fischer were writing, ‘liberal feminists’ were considered to be the ‘most numerous’ of the feminists.

At the extreme end of the continuum, opposing the postmodern view of gender as an irrelevant variable, is what Bristor and Fischer (1993) label the ‘women’s voice or experience’ point of view. This perspective allows for the fact that there are more or less permanent differences between male and female experiences, and that female experiences constitute an equally valid basis for developing knowledge and organizing society (Calas and Smircich 1991). This way of thinking, in contrast to that of liberal feminists, does not consider men and women to be essentially the same. On the contrary, it tends to subscribe to the view that ‘distinctions of gender, based on sex, structure virtually every aspect of our lives’ (Jagger 1983, 85).

The reader needs to understand that within the ‘women’s voice or experience’ perspective embraces two opposing points of view (Bristor and Fischer 1993). The first holds that differences between men and women are primarily or largely innate and linked to biology, a view that emphasizes the unique biologically based creative capabilities of women, suggesting that they form the basis for a distinctive female way of thinking. From there it is a small step to the evolutionary psychological perspective (Lupotow et al. 1995), which is gaining in popularity in several disciplines and which views sex differences as the bi-product of historical circumstances and affecting male and female success in the reproductive stakes. According to a review of gender in marketing this approach forms an ‘influential, emerging paradigm that could have significant implications for the study of gender and consumption’ (Caterall and Maclaran 2002, 417).

One should not perhaps be surprised by the less than enthusiastic support given to the evolutionary psychological approach. Dr Rick O’Gorman for example, an academic at Sheffield Hallam University, has argued that ‘the social sciences have in large part been resistant to acknowledging that at least some aspects of human behaviour and cognition are likely due not primarily to socialization processes, ill-defined as these are, but due instead to a result of the phylogenetic and evolutionary history of Homo sapiens’ (O’Gorman 1999, 96). This resistance has fuelled a concern to reject biological determinism and instead viewed gender as a purely socially constructed category, albeit one deeply embedded and rooted in real differences in life worlds. This is the second view within the ‘women’s voice’ perspective.

Regardless of which of these two positions are adopted, a central concern of those adopting the ‘women’s voice or experience’ perspective has been to eradicate the subordination of women by validating that which is associated with femaleness. As a consequence, androgyny has not been presented as an ideal that will help to achieve this goal (Bristor and Fischer 1993). On the contrary, most people who adopt this perspective argue, as a minimum for the importance of recognizing the ways in which knowledge is gendered and gaining legitimacy for that feminine knowledge that has been suppressed or marginalized.

One consequence of this way of thinking is the tendency of ‘women’s voice’ feminists tend to identify theories and practices that are male-gendered and tend to contrast these with the female alternatives. For instance, definitions of moral development have been construed as male biased (Gilligan 1982) since they are based on the masculine tendency to assume a sharp distinction between the self and other. This contrasts with purportedly feminine notions of morality in which the boundaries between the self and other are thought to be more fluid (Bristor and Fischer 1993). Those adopting the ‘women’s voice or experience’ perspective might also consider predominantly middle-class white male scholarly community has persistently studied the consumption of durables in a way that betrays a lack of understanding of female consumers. To rectify this, they might argue, experiments on consumer attitudes need to involve men as well as women.

You might be wondering where along this spectrum of attitudes this particular book lies? The answer is that it pretty unequivocally shares the ‘women’s voice and experience’ perspective and so must, of necessity, it must come into conflict with the postmodern and liberal feminist perspectives. I make no apology for this and signal in advance that the gender differences described here are presented as having their roots in social and biological factors. However, this view is presented without a detailed discussion of the evidence and without this, such a position would be untenable.

Having now understood the main positions adopted by researchers investigating gender and consumer behaviour, we can look briefly at how the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ are used in this book. The first term, ‘gender’, is a social concept referring to psychologically, sociologically or culturally rooted traits, attitudes, beliefs and behavioural tendencies, with a linked notion that gender is not fully determined by sex (Bristor and Fischer 1993). The term ‘sex’, on the other hand, is a biological concept that allows us to distinguish between males and females purely on the basis of physiological characteristics. Its influence beyond that is subject to question with Fischer and Arnold taking the view that biological sex per se does not predetermine behaviour … [but] has a profound influence on a person’s socialization experience (Fischer and Arnold 1990, 519) and others holding that it can have a substantial impact on emotions and behaviours (Brizendine 2006). As one American team of researchers has put it, ‘gendered differences are only sociologically inevitable’ while ‘sexual differences are largely biologically determined’ (Gentry et al. 2003, 1). The term ‘gender’ is used in an unorthodox way in most of this book to connote both these meanings.

With positions and terms behind us, we can now move forward and examine the place that men and women occupy as consumers and decision makers. It is important to do this since, as we have seen there is a view that business strategies should be framed around customers. This takes us back to the story of the advertising campaign for green energy and prompts us to ask questions about the market for this type of energy. What does a typical customer look like?

The market for green energy

When I asked the organizers about the demographics of the market for green energy, there was a long silence until another question saved the day and spared the organizers the embarrassment of answering my question. Back in my office, I was eager to obtain information on the market for domestic energy, and green energy in particular. Within a short space of time I had some answers. Jan Pahl, an academic from the University of Kent and an expert on male and female expenditure patterns, established that the rather dubious honour of settling household bills falls largely to women (2000). Unfortunately, Pahl had not studied the question of energy decisions and i...